Bureaucracy and technology, those great forces in contemporary life, too often seem to crowd out the actions of individuals. This is particularly true in war, the most complex form of human organizational behavior. In the academy, the “great captains” approach to military history remains profoundly unfashionable. Andrew Roberts is a distinguished military historian who is not afraid to be unfashionable. In this slim volume, originally a series of lectures delivered to the New-York Historical Society, Roberts offers thumbnail sketches of nine war leaders, from Napoleon to Margaret Thatcher. This is well-trod territory, and Roberts has traversed much of it himself in a number of weighty and well-received scholarly biographies, notably on Napoleon and Churchill, as well as volumes on the military history of the Napoleonic wars and World War II. But Roberts succeeds admirably in drawing sharp, concise portraits that highlight the essentials, while occasionally narrowing the focus to address in some detail what he regards as common misconceptions of the qualities or achievements of particular leaders.
Two points may be registered at the outset. First, although Roberts is a Brit of the old school, his is an international cast, and he makes very clear in the first chapter a perhaps surprising partiality for Napoleon. He is also effusive in his praise of American generals George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and goes out of his way to defend them from criticisms frequently leveled by American and British historians. Second, he does not shrink from mixing villains with heroes. Hitler and Stalin were not “great” leaders in any tolerable sense of the term, but they were certainly leaders “who made history,” even at the cost of tens of millions of lives and the devastation of Europe.
Roberts is especially scathing on Hitler. “[W]hy was this absurd, mediocre, boorish, self-regarding, physically unprepossessing excuse for an Aryan superman so popular for so long?” he asks. He also makes short shrift of any claim to military competence on Hitler’s part. Roberts’s long list of the Führer’s “terrible strategic errors” includes his diversion of troops to the Ukraine rather than taking Moscow, his failure to retreat from Stalingrad, his declaration of war on the United States, and the related failure throughout the war to coordinate strategy with the Japanese. Interestingly, Roberts also cites the Holocaust as, in addition to “the foulest crime in the history of mankind,” a strategic mistake which eliminated a “well-educated and hardworking section of the German population” at a time when the number of Germans engaged in industrial production was falling by the millions.
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The brief chapter on Churchill breaks no new ground, but has some striking formulations. “When Churchill was finally made prime minister in May 1940, the British had lost the war—comprehensively, according to every metric—but there was a huge difference between losing a war and realizing one has lost it…. Winston Churchill’s primary duty in 1940 and 1941 was to prevent the British people from realizing that they had lost the war, and nobody did it better, not least because he utterly refused to accept the logic of the situation himself.” In explaining Churchill’s (unusual for his class and time) philosemitism, Roberts says that he did not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ but rather thought of him as a “very wise and charismatic rabbi,” making Churchill “theologically a lot closer to Judaism than to the Anglican Church into which he was born. He joked that he saw his relationship to the Church of England as like a flying buttress, in that he supported it but from the outside.”
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